Harrow laid the footings of the north wall with his own hands, one course at a time, and he counted every stone aloud as it went into the bed. He had counted stones since before he could remember what a stone was for. It was the first thing he had known when he woke at the broken gate, a grey weight in his palms and a number in his head, and the number had been waiting for him, like a dog at a door.
“Four hundred and twelve,” he said, setting the block into the mortar and tapping it square with the heel of his hand.
The mason’s boy who carried the mortar for him, a Lowgate boy from the Kitchen end of the court, said nothing, because the boy had learned in one week that Harrow would not be interrupted and would not be hurried. He lifted the next block with both arms and set it on the trestle, and Harrow took it, and laid it.
“Four hundred and thirteen.”
The wall had grown a stone since the morning. Harrow had known it at breakfast, when he had looked at the footings from the Kitchen window and found the line one block longer than he had left it the night before. He had said nothing to Pell about it, because Pell would have asked him whether the stone was good, and he would have had to say that it was, and then she would have wanted to bake it.
He reached the seventh course by noon. The footings were level, and the first three rows of the new north face stood square and grey above the ground, and the stone was the same stone he had carried up from the Hold’s quarry, cut to the same size with the same chisel. He ran his palm along the top of the course, feeling for the joins, and found every join true. Then he counted the courses again from the bottom, and found eight. He had been certain there were seven.
He stopped with his hand on the wall.
“It is different,” he said. He did not say it to anyone in particular. He said it to the stone. “The Foundation’s wall was a wall of seven. Ours is not the same wall. Ours has counted itself.”
“Harrow.” Idrin was on the walk above him, leaning on the parapet with a slate under one arm, looking out across the marsh. The Warden had been up there since the bell for the first watch, working on something he kept on the slate and would not show anyone. “The Chamber is asking whether you want the north gate hung before the rains.”
“Is the weather coming?” Harrow asked him.
Idrin turned his head. He had learned, in the six weeks since the gate, that Harrow asked questions in return for questions, and that a reply to his question about the wall would always be a question about the weather. He had grown fond of it. He looked at the sky over the marsh, where the cloud lay in a long grey band above the reeds, and then at the wall beneath him, and then at Harrow.
“Yes,” he said. “Rain, by the look of it. Two days, perhaps three.”
“What rain?” said Harrow.
Idrin laughed. He had caught him, he thought, and he came down the stair to the wall-foot with the slate still under his arm and his face bright. “Rain is rain,” he said. “What other kind is there? The Chamber would like to know whether it should hang the gate or wait for the dry.”
“That is not a question I will answer,” said Harrow, and he picked up the next block, and set it, and tapped it square. “The wall will hold through the rain. It does not need to be told.”
“Then tell me whether the wall will hold.”
“Four hundred and fourteen,” said Harrow.
Ysra came up the stair from the court with a bucket in one hand and a coil of rope over her shoulder and her eyes already on the joins. She was counting. Harrow could see her lips moving. She counted the steps as she climbed, under her breath, and at every turning of the stair she paused and looked back through the arrow-slit at the new wall, and then she went on again. At the seventh course she stopped altogether and set the bucket down.
“Your wall is one stone too many,” she said.
“The wall has no plan,” said Harrow. “Only a count.”
“Then the count is wrong.”
“The count asked me to lay it.” He straightened his back. It made a small, comfortable noise, like a joint finding its socket. “I added the stone because the count asked for it, and the count was correct, and the wall is correct, and the stone is in the wall, and it will stay there through the rain. Do you not agree?”
Ysra looked at the wall and then at the stair and then at the wall again. “I have counted my stair against your wall,” she said, “since the first day. My stair is nine steps and a landing. Your wall is eight courses high, and the two counts together make a number I do not recognise. It does not add up. It does not divide. I have tried it both ways.”
“What number is it?”
“I do not know,” said Ysra. “That is why I am telling you.”
She took a stick of chalk from her apron pocket and went to the inner face of the wall, where the stone was still raw. Harrow watched her write. She wrote the two counts, one above the other, and then drew a line beneath them, and beneath the line she made a mark that was neither a number nor a letter, a small upright notch with a hook at its top. Then she stood back and looked at it, and Harrow saw that her hands were shaking.
“It is wrong,” she said quietly. “It is the wrong shape for a count.”
“Leave it,” said Harrow.
“Shall I rub it out?”
“No. It is correct.” He turned back to the wall and reached for the next block, and his hands did not shake, because they had been carrying stone for longer than he had been carrying the count. “The chalk is a count too, Ysra. Leave it where it is. A wall should have one number on it that nobody can agree about. It keeps the others honest.”
Idrin had come down the last of the steps. He had heard all of it, and he did not say anything at first. He looked at the chalk mark, and he looked at the seventh course, and then he said, in the careful voice of a man who was trying not to sound like a prince, “Can the Chamber be told what the number is worth?”
“It is worth one stone,” said Harrow, “and that is one stone more than the Foundation counted. You will have to ask the Clerk whether one stone more is a share.”
“I have asked him,” said Idrin. “He said he would have to find the clause and give me a figure.”
“Then he will be some time,” Harrow said.
Ysra’s chalk mark stayed on the inner face of the wall through the afternoon. In the long shadow of the north tower the Hands came to look at it one at a time, without anybody sending for them. Korrin came, and stood with his arms folded, and said that a count you could not argue with was a count you could stand on, and went away again. Pell came with a bowl of barley, set it on the stone step, and gave the chalk no notice at all. Gaunt came because he was passing. He read the two counts aloud in a voice of contempt, then stopped at the hook at the top of the mark, read it again more slowly, and said nothing at all.
“It is not a number,” said Gaunt at last. “It is a hook. Hooks are for hanging things on.”
“What is hanging?” asked Harrow, without turning round.
“The wall,” said Gaunt, and went back to the forge without objecting to anything else that day. Tallow later recorded it as the most suspicious minute of the summer.
They went on working. The mortar was thick and cold, and the sun was going behind the cloud, and the marsh wind had turned round to the west and was pushing the reeds flat in long bands, as a hand pushes a cloth. Harrow counted, and Ysra climbed and descended, and Idrin stood at the wall-foot with his slate and wrote something on it and rubbed it out and wrote it again. It was almost the end of the day when Harrow found the cut stone.
It lay under the seventh course, at the join where the new wall met the old, a small block of grey stone a little smaller than the others. He lifted the mortar away from its face with his thumb and found a mark cut into it, very worn, in the shape of a bell. The bell had no clapper. Its lip was a plain curve, and its shoulders were a little too wide, and when he tapped it with his knuckle a faint note came up through the wall, very low, as if the bell were being struck from inside a barrel that was a long way down.
Harrow put his palm flat against the stone and felt the note go through his arm. He did not count it. He could not. The note was longer than any count he knew.
“Ysra,” he said, very quietly.
She was already on the stair above him, with her bucket in her hand, and she had stopped with one foot raised.
“Someone,” said Ysra, after a long moment, “is on the stair.”
But there was no one on the stair, and when she looked down, it was only the bell-shaped stone, humming against the grey, under Harrow’s hand.